Before going into hiding

Anne Frank in December 1941

For her thirteenth birthday on 12 June 1942, Anne received an autograph book,^[30] bound with red-and-white checkered cloth^[31] and with a small lock on the front. Frank decided she would use it as a diary,^[32] and had named it Kitty. She began writing in it almost immediately. In her entry dated 20 June 1942, she lists many of the restrictions placed upon the lives of the Dutch Jewish population.^[33]

In mid-1942, the systematic deportation of Jews from the Netherlands started.^[34] Otto and Edith Frank planned to go into hiding with the children on 16 July 1942, but when Margot received a call-up notice from the Zentralstelle für jüdische Auswanderung (Central Office for Jewish Emigration) on 5 July, ordering her to report for relocation to a work camp, they were forced to move the plan ten days forward.^[35] Shortly before going into hiding, Anne gave her friend and next-door neighbor Toosje Kupers a book, a tea set, and a tin of marbles. On 6 July, the Frank family left a note for the Kupers, asking them to take care of their cat Moortje. As the Associated Press reports: "'I'm worried about my marbles, because I'm scared they might fall into the wrong hands,' Kupers said Anne told her. 'Could you keep them for me for a little while?'"^[36]

Life in the Achterhuis

Reconstruction of the bookcase that covered the entrance to the Secret Annex, in the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam

On the morning of Monday, 6 July 1942,^[37] the Frank family moved into their hiding place, a three-story space entered from a landing above the Opekta offices on the Prinsengracht, where some of Otto Frank's most trusted employees would be their helpers. This hiding place became known as the Achterhuis (translated into "Secret Annex" in English editions of the diary). Their apartment was left in a state of disarray to create the impression that they had left suddenly, and Otto left a note that hinted they were going to Switzerland. The need for secrecy forced them to leave behind Anne's cat, Moortje. As Jews were not allowed to use public transport, Otto, Edith and Anne walked several kilometres from their home. Margot cycled to the Prinsengracht with Miep Gies.^[38][39] The door to the Achterhuis was later covered by a bookcase to ensure it remained undiscovered.^[40]

Victor Kugler, Johannes Kleiman, Miep Gies, and Bep Voskuijl were the only employees who knew of the people in hiding. Along with Gies' husband Jan Gies and Voskuijl's father Johannes Hendrik Voskuijl, they were the "helpers" for the duration of their confinement. The only connection between the outside world and the occupants of the house, they kept the occupants informed of war news and political developments. They catered to all of their needs, ensured their safety, and supplied them with food, a task that grew more difficult with the passage of time. Frank wrote of their dedication and of their efforts to boost morale within the household during the most dangerous of times. All were aware that, if caught, they could face the death penalty for sheltering Jews.^[41]

Canal-side façade of the former Opekta building (center-left) on Prinsengracht canal. The Secret Annex (Achterhuis) is at the rear in an enclosed courtyard.

Model of the former Opekta front building (left) and rear building / Secret Annex (right) where Anne Frank stayed

On 13 July 1942, the Franks were joined by the Van Pels family, made up of Hermann, Auguste, and 16-year-old Peter, and then in November by Fritz Pfeffer, a dentist and friend of the family. Frank wrote of her pleasure at having new people to talk to, but tensions quickly developed within the group forced to live in such confined conditions. After sharing her room with Pfeffer, she found him to be insufferable and resented his intrusion,^[42] and she clashed with Auguste van Pels, whom she regarded as foolish. She regarded Hermann van Pels and Fritz Pfeffer as selfish, particularly in regard to the amount of food they consumed.^[43] Some time later, after first dismissing the shy and awkward Peter van Pels, she recognized a kinship with him and the two entered a romance. She received her first kiss from him, but her infatuation with him began to wane as she questioned whether her feelings for him were genuine, or resulted from their shared confinement.^[44] Anne Frank formed a close bond with each of the helpers, and Otto Frank later recalled that she had anticipated their daily visits with impatient enthusiasm. He observed that Anne's closest friendship was with Bep Voskuijl, "the young typist… the two of them often stood whispering in the corner."^[45]

The young diarist

In her writing, Frank examined her relationships with the members of her family, and the strong differences in each of their personalities. She was closest emotionally to her father, who later said, "I got on better with Anne than with Margot, who was more attached to her mother. The reason for that may have been that Margot rarely showed her feelings and didn't need as much support because she didn't suffer from mood swings as much as Anne did."^[46] The Frank sisters formed a closer relationship than had existed before they went into hiding, although Anne sometimes expressed jealousy towards Margot, particularly when members of the household criticized Anne for lacking Margot's gentle and placid nature. As Anne began to mature, the sisters were able to confide in each other. In her entry of 12 January 1944, Frank wrote, "Margot's much nicer… She's not nearly so catty these days and is becoming a real friend. She no longer thinks of me as a little baby who doesn't count."^[47]

Amsterdam from the Westerkerk w/partial view of the Secret Annex (just up from the dark gray building on near-right corner, just right of block-like square gray roof of 2nd building from corner) with light-tan wall and a single small window

Frank frequently wrote of her difficult relationship with her mother, and of her ambivalence towards her. On 7 November 1942, she described her "contempt" for her mother and her inability to "confront her with her carelessness, her sarcasm and her hard-heartedness," before concluding, "She's not a mother to me."^[48] Later, as she revised her diary, Frank felt ashamed of her harsh attitude, writing: "Anne, is it really you who mentioned hate, oh Anne, how could you?"^[49] She came to understand that their differences resulted from misunderstandings that were as much her fault as her mother's, and saw that she had added unnecessarily to her mother's suffering. With this realization, Frank began to treat her mother with a degree of tolerance and respect.^[50]

The Frank sisters each hoped to return to school as soon as they were able, and continued with their studies while in hiding. Margot took a course 'Elementary Latin' by correspondence in Bep Voskuijl's name and received high marks.^[51] Most of Anne's time was spent reading and studying, and she regularly wrote and edited (after March 1944) her diary entries. In addition to providing a narrative of events as they occurred, she wrote about her feelings, beliefs, dreams and ambitions, subjects she felt she could not discuss with anyone. As her confidence in her writing grew, and as she began to mature, she wrote of more abstract subjects such as her belief in God, and how she defined human nature.^[52]

Frank aspired to become a journalist, writing in her diary on Wednesday, 5 April 1944:

I finally realized that I must do my schoolwork to keep from being ignorant, to get on in life, to become a journalist, because that's what I want! I know I can write ..., but it remains to be seen whether I really have talent ...

And if I don't have the talent to write books or newspaper articles, I can always write for myself. But I want to achieve more than that. I can't imagine living like Mother, Mrs. van Daan and all the women who go about their work and are then forgotten. I need to have something besides a husband and children to devote myself to! ...

I want to be useful or bring enjoyment to all people, even those I've never met. I want to go on living even after my death! And that's why I'm so grateful to God for having given me this gift, which I can use to develop myself and to express all that's inside me!

When I write I can shake off all my cares. My sorrow disappears, my spirits are revived! But, and that's a big question, will I ever be able to write something great, will I ever become a journalist or a writer?^[53]

She continued writing regularly until her last entry of 1 August 1944.^[54]

Source of discovery

In 2015, Flemish journalist Jeroen De Bruyn and Joop van Wijk, Bep Voskuijl's youngest son, wrote a biography^{[lower-alpha 1]} in which they alleged that Bep's younger sister Nelly (1923–2001) could have betrayed the Franks. Nelly was a Nazi collaborator from the age of 19 to 23.^[59] She had run away to Austria with a Nazi officer, and returned to Amsterdam in 1943 after the relationship ended.^[60] Nelly had been critical of Bep and their father, Johannes Voskuijl, for helping the Jews;^[61] Johannes was the one who constructed the bookcase covering the entrance to the hiding place and remained as an unofficial watchman of the hideout.^[60] In one of their quarrels, Nelly shouted to them, "Go to your Jews."^[62] Karl Josef Silberbauer, the SS officer who made the arrest, was reported to have said that the informer had "the voice of a young woman".^[63][64]

In 2016, the Anne Frank House published new research pointing to an investigation over ration card fraud, rather than betrayal, as a possible explanation for the raid that led to the arrest of the Franks.^[65] The report stated that other activities in the building may have led authorities there, including activities of Frank's company; however, it did not rule out betrayal.^[66]

A 2018 book suggested Ans van Dijk, a Dutch Jew who betrayed at least 145 fellow Jews to the Gestapo, as a potential candidate for the informant. Dutch resistance fighter Gerard Kremer, who worked as a caretaker at an office building requisitioned by the Sicherheitsdienst, apparently witnessed Van Dijk visiting the building in August 1944 and overheard her talking with her SD superiors about Prinsengracht, where the Franks were hiding. However, another book examining this possibility noted that many of Van Dijk's victims had lived in or near Prinsengracht.^[67]

In January 2022, some investigators proposed Arnold van den Bergh, a member of Amsterdam's Jewish Council who died in 1950, as the suspected informant.^[68][69] The investigators postulated that Van den Bergh gave up the Franks to save his family. The investigation is chronicled in Rosemary Sullivan's English-language book, The Betrayal of Anne Frank: A Cold Case Investigation.^[70] Evidence was also claimed to have been found that Anne Frank's father later knew this but did not reveal it after the war.^[68] According to the BBC, these investigators "spent six years using modern investigative techniques to crack the 'cold case…'."^[68] However, according to The New York Times, several World War II and Holocaust scholars have doubted the methods and conclusions of the investigators, calling the evidence "far too thin".^[71]

Shortly after the publication of The Betrayal of Anne Frank, after criticism from scholars Bart van der Boom, David Barnouw and Johannes Houwink ten Cate, Dutch publishing house Ambo Anthos, which had published a Dutch translation, apologized via an internal email. The publisher said they should have been more critical and announced that they are "await(ing) the answers from the researchers to the questions that have emerged and are delaying the decision to print another run".^[72][73][74] In response, Pieter van Twisk, one of the investigators referenced in the book, said that he was "perplexed by the email" and that the investigators had never claimed to have uncovered the complete truth.^[74] In March 2022, a group of World War Two experts and historians published their analysis of the conclusions and of the historical sources used in The Betrayal of Anne Frank; they contested the central claim that the Amsterdam Jewish council even had a list of Jewish hiding places that Van den Bergh could draw on, and concluded that the accusation of Van den Bergh was based on weak assumptions and lack of historical knowledge.^[75] As a result, the Dutch language version of the book was recalled by Ambo Anthos.^[76][77]

On 19 August 2022, the Dutch researcher Natasha Gerson published an 80-page report analyzing the annotations and sources in The Betrayal of Anne Frank, which argued that the theory in the book was not only flawed but the product of source fraud.^[78][79][80] The report concluded that Otto Frank's recorded agenda, as well as a letter Otto received from helper Johannes Kleiman and several other statements, were proven to be distorted to suit the outcome in the book. Several negative claims about Van den Bergh had Anton Schepers, a Nazi adversary who was diagnosed twice as insane and who had taken over Van den Bergh's notary practice, as the only source. This included the claim of Nazi contacts and a commission of 200,000 guilders paid on the sale of Jacques Goudstikker's art business. While The Betrayal of Anne Frank stated that Van den Bergh enjoyed the protection of two high-up Nazis, the CCT and Sullivan had omitted statements that the named Nazis had not known Van den Bergh.^[81] Plans to publish a German translation of Sullivan's book, previously postponed, were cancelled soon afterwards.^[79]

Publication

Het Achterhuis (literally, "the rear house"), the first Dutch edition of Anne Frank's diary, published in 1947, later translated into English as The Diary of a Young Girl

In July 1945, after the sisters Janny and Lien Brilleslijper, who were with Anne and Margot Frank in Bergen-Belsen,^[114] confirmed the deaths of the Frank sisters, Miep Gies gave Otto Frank Anne's notebooks (including the red-and-white checkered diary) and a bundle of loose notes that she and Bep Voskuijl had saved in the hope of returning them to Anne. Otto Frank later commented that he had not realized Anne had kept such an accurate and well-written record of their time in hiding. In his memoir, he described the painful process of reading the diary, recognizing the events described and recalling that he had already heard some of the more amusing episodes read aloud by his daughter. He saw for the first time the more private side of his daughter and those sections of the diary she had not discussed with anyone, noting, "For me it was a revelation… I had no idea of the depth of her thoughts and feelings… She had kept all these feelings to herself".^[115] Moved by her repeated wish to be an author, he began to consider having it published.^[116]

Frank's diary began as a private expression of her thoughts; she wrote several times that she would never allow anyone to read it. She candidly described her life, her family and companions, and their situation, while beginning to recognize her ambition to write fiction for publication. In March 1944, she heard a radio broadcast by Gerrit Bolkestein—a member of the Dutch government in exile, based in London—who said that when the war ended, he would create a public record of the Dutch people's oppression under German occupation.^[117] He mentioned the publication of letters and diaries, and Frank decided to submit her work when the time came. She began editing her writing, removing some sections and rewriting others, with a view to publication. Her original notebook was supplemented by additional notebooks and loose-leaf sheets of paper. She created pseudonyms for the members of the household and the helpers. The Van Pels family became Hermann, Petronella, and Peter van Daan, and Fritz Pfeffer became Albert Düssell. In this edited version, she addressed each entry to "Kitty," a fictional character in Cissy van Marxveldt's Joop ter Heul novels that Anne enjoyed reading. Otto Frank used her original diary, known as "version A", and her edited version, known as "version B", to produce the first version for publication. Although he restored the true identities of his own family, he retained all of the other pseudonyms.^[118]

Otto Frank gave the diary to the historian Annie Romein-Verschoor, who tried unsuccessfully to have it published. She then gave it to her husband Jan Romein, who wrote an article about it, titled "Kinderstem" ("A Child's Voice"), which was published in the newspaper Het Parool on 3 April 1946. He wrote that the diary "stammered out in a child's voice, embodies all the hideousness of fascism, more so than all the evidence at Nuremberg put together."^[119] His article attracted attention from publishers, and the diary was published in the Netherlands as Het Achterhuis (The Annex) (literally, "the back house") in 1947,^[120] followed by five more printings by 1950.^[121]

It was first published in Germany and France in 1950, and after being rejected by several publishers, was first published in the United Kingdom in 1952. The first American edition, published in 1952 under the title Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl, was positively reviewed. The book was successful in France, Germany, and the United States, but in the United Kingdom it failed to attract an audience and by 1953 was out of print. Its most noteworthy success was in Japan, where it received critical acclaim and sold more than 100,000 copies in its first edition. In Japan, Anne Frank quickly was identified as an important cultural figure who represented the destruction of youth during the war.^[122]

A play by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett based upon the diary premiered in New York City on 5 October 1955, and later won a Pulitzer Prize for Drama. It was followed by the film The Diary of Anne Frank (1959), which was a critical and commercial success. Biographer Melissa Müller later wrote that the dramatization had "contributed greatly to the romanticizing, sentimentalizing and universalizing of Anne's story."^[123] Over the years the popularity of the diary grew, and in many schools, particularly in the United States, it was included as part of the curriculum, introducing Anne Frank to new generations of readers.^[124]

Reception

The diary has been praised for its literary merits. Commenting on Anne Frank's writing style, the dramatist Meyer Levin commended Frank for "sustaining the tension of a well-constructed novel",^[125] and was so impressed by the quality of her work that he collaborated with Otto Frank on a dramatization of the diary shortly after its publication.^[126] Levin became obsessed with Anne Frank, which he wrote about in his autobiography The Obsession. The poet John Berryman called the book a unique depiction, not merely of adolescence but of the "conversion of a child into a person as it is happening in a precise, confident, economical style stunning in its honesty".^[127]

In her introduction to the diary's first American edition, Eleanor Roosevelt described it as "one of the wisest and most moving commentaries on war and its impact on human beings that I have ever read."^[128] John F. Kennedy discussed Anne Frank in a 1961 speech, and said, "Of all the multitudes who throughout history have spoken for human dignity in times of great suffering and loss, no voice is more compelling than that of Anne Frank."^[129][130] In the same year, the Soviet writer Ilya Ehrenburg wrote of her: "one voice speaks for six million—the voice not of a sage or a poet but of an ordinary little girl."^[131]

As Anne Frank's stature as both a writer and humanist has grown, she has been discussed specifically as a symbol of the Holocaust and more broadly as a representative of persecution.^[132] Hillary Clinton, in her acceptance speech for an Elie Wiesel Humanitarian Award in 1994, read from Anne Frank's diary and spoke of her "awakening us to the folly of indifference and the terrible toll it takes on our young," which Clinton related to contemporary events in Sarajevo, Somalia and Rwanda.^[133] After receiving a humanitarian award from the Anne Frank Foundation in 1994, Nelson Mandela addressed a crowd in Johannesburg, saying he had read Anne Frank's diary while in prison and "derived much encouragement from it." He likened her struggle against Nazism to his struggle against apartheid, drawing a parallel between the two philosophies: "Because these beliefs are patently false, and because they were, and will always be, challenged by the likes of Anne Frank, they are bound to fail."^[134] Also in 1994, Václav Havel said "Anne Frank's legacy is very much alive and it can address us fully" in relation to the political and social changes occurring at the time in former Eastern Bloc countries.^[129]

Primo Levi suggested Anne Frank is frequently identified as a single representative of the millions of people who suffered and died as she did because "One single Anne Frank moves us more than the countless others who suffered just as she did but whose faces have remained in the shadows. Perhaps it is better that way; if we were capable of taking in all the suffering of all those people, we would not be able to live."^[129] In her closing message in Müller's biography of Anne Frank, Miep Gies expressed a similar thought, though she attempted to dispel what she felt was a growing misconception that "Anne symbolizes the six million victims of the Holocaust", writing: "Anne's life and death were her own individual fate, an individual fate that happened six million times over. Anne cannot, and should not, stand for the many individuals whom the Nazis robbed of their lives… But her fate helps us grasp the immense loss the world suffered because of the Holocaust."^[135]

Otto Frank spent the remainder of his life as custodian of his daughter's legacy, saying, "It's a strange role. In the normal family relationship, it is the child of the famous parent who has the honour and the burden of continuing the task. In my case the role is reversed." He recalled his publisher's explaining why he thought the diary has been so widely read, with the comment, "he said that the diary encompasses so many areas of life that each reader can find something that moves him personally".^[136] Simon Wiesenthal expressed a similar sentiment when he said that the diary had raised more widespread awareness of the Holocaust than had been achieved during the Nuremberg Trials, because "people identified with this child. This was the impact of the Holocaust, this was a family like my family, like your family and so you could understand this."^[137]

In June 1999, Time magazine published a special edition titled "Time 100: The Most Important People of the Century". Anne Frank was selected as one of the "Heroes & Icons", and the writer, Roger Rosenblatt, described her legacy with the comment, "The passions the book ignites suggest that everyone owns Anne Frank, that she has risen above the Holocaust, Judaism, girlhood and even goodness and become a totemic figure of the modern world—the moral individual mind beset by the machinery of destruction, insisting on the right to live and question and hope for the future of human beings." He notes that while her courage and pragmatism are admired, her ability to analyse herself and the quality of her writing are the key components of her appeal. He writes, "The reason for her immortality was basically literary. She was an extraordinarily good writer, for any age, and the quality of her work seemed a direct result of a ruthlessly honest disposition."^[138]

Denials of authenticity and legal action

After the diary became widely known in the late 1950s, various allegations against the veracity of the diary and/or its contents appeared, with the earliest published criticisms occurring in Sweden and Norway.^[139] In 1957, Fria ord ("Free Words"), the magazine of the Swedish neofascist organization National League of Sweden, published an article by Danish author and critic Harald Nielsen, who had previously written antisemitic articles about the Danish-Jewish author Georg Brandes.^[140] Among other things, the article claimed that the diary had been written by Meyer Levin.^[141]

In 1958, at a performance of The Diary of Anne Frank in Vienna, Simon Wiesenthal was challenged by a group of protesters who asserted that Anne Frank had never existed, and who challenged Wiesenthal to prove her existence by finding the man who had arrested her. Wiesenthal indeed began searching for Karl Silberbauer and found him in 1963. When interviewed, Silberbauer admitted his role, and identified Anne Frank from a photograph as one of the people arrested. Silberbauer provided a full account of events, even recalling emptying a briefcase full of papers onto the floor. His statement corroborated the version of events that had previously been presented by witnesses such as Otto Frank.^[142]

In 1959, Otto Frank took legal action in Lübeck against Lothar Stielau, a school teacher and former Hitler Youth member who published a school paper that described the diary as "a forgery". The complaint was extended to include Heinrich Buddegerg, who wrote a letter in support of Stielau, which was published in a Lübeck newspaper. The court examined the diary in 1960 and authenticated the handwriting as matching that in letters known to have been written by Anne Frank. They declared the diary to be genuine. Stielau recanted his earlier statement, and Otto Frank did not pursue the case any further.^[141]

In 1976, Otto Frank took action against Heinz Roth of Frankfurt, who published pamphlets stating that the diary was "a forgery". The judge ruled that if Roth were to publish any further statements he would be subjected to a fine of 500,000 German marks and a six-month jail sentence. Roth appealed against the court's decision. He died in 1978, and after a year his appeal was rejected.^[141]

Otto Frank mounted a lawsuit in 1976 against Ernst Römer, who distributed a pamphlet titled "The Diary of Anne Frank, Bestseller, A Lie". When a man named Edgar Geiss distributed the same pamphlet in the courtroom, he too was prosecuted. Römer was fined 1,500 Deutschmarks,^[141] and Geiss was sentenced to six months' imprisonment. The sentence of Geiss was reduced on appeal, and the case was eventually dropped following a subsequent appeal because the time limit for filing a libel case had expired.^[143]

With Otto Frank's death in 1980, the original diary, including letters and loose sheets, was willed to the Dutch Institute for War Documentation,^[144] which commissioned a forensic study of the diary through the Netherlands Ministry of Justice in 1986. They examined the handwriting against known examples and found that they matched. They determined that the paper, glue, and ink were readily available during the time the diary was said to have been written. They concluded that the diary is authentic, and their findings were published in what has become known as the "Critical Edition" of the diary.^[145] In 1990, the Hamburg Regional Court confirmed the diary's authenticity.^[146]

In 1991, Holocaust deniers Robert Faurisson and Siegfried Verbeke produced a booklet titled "The Diary of Anne Frank: A Critical Approach", in which they revived the allegation that Otto Frank wrote the diary. Purported evidence, as before, included several contradictions in the diary, that the prose style and handwriting were not those of a teenager, and that hiding in the Achterhuis would have been impossible.^[147] In 1993, the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam and the Anne Frank Fonds in Basel filed a civil lawsuit to prohibit further distribution of Faurisson and Verbeke's booklet in the Netherlands. In 1998, the Amsterdam District Court ruled in favour of the claimants, forbade any further denial of the authenticity of the diary and unsolicited distribution of publications to that effect, and imposed a penalty of 25,000 guilders per infringement.^[148]

Censored sections

Since the original publication, several sections of Anne's diaries which were initially edited out have been revealed and included in new editions.^[149] These contain passages relating to her sexuality, exploration of her genitalia, and her thoughts on menstruation.^[150][151] Following the conclusion of an ownership dispute in 2001, new editions have also incorporated pages removed by Otto Frank prior to publication which contain critical remarks about her parents' strained marriage and discuss her difficult relationship with her mother.^[152][153] Two additional pages which Anne had pasted over with brown paper were deciphered in 2018, and contained an attempt to explain sex education and a handful of "dirty" jokes.^[151][154]